UBC leads the way in green innovations

Shawn Conner, Special to The Sun05.30.2014

Orion Henderson is the Director of Sustainability and Engineering, Campus & Community Planning, at The University of British Columbia. The CIRS building (pictured), does things like capture rainwater and treat it for drinking, and treating toilet and sink water for use in landscaping and flushing toilets.Jenelle Schneider
/ SUN

The CIRS building at UBC (pictured), does things like capture rainwater and treat it for drinking, and treating toilet and sink water for use in landscaping and flushing toilets.Jenelle Schneider
/ SUN

Orion Henderson is the Director of Sustainability and Engineering, Campus & Community Planning, at The University of British Columbia. The CIRS building (pictured), does things like capture rainwater and treat it for drinking, and treating toilet and sink water for use in landscaping and flushing toilets.Jenelle Schneider
/ SUN

The CIRS building at UBC (pictured), does things like capture rainwater and treat it for drinking, and treating toilet and sink water for use in landscaping and flushing toilets.Jenelle Schneider
/ SUN

Orion Henderson is the Director of Sustainability and Engineering, Campus & Community Planning, at The University of British Columbia. The CIRS building (pictured), does things like capture rainwater and treat it for drinking, and treating toilet and sink water for use in landscaping and flushing toilets.Jenelle Schneider
/ SUN

The CIRS building at UBC (pictured), does things like capture rainwater and treat it for drinking, and treating toilet and sink water for use in landscaping and flushing toilets.Jenelle Schneider
/ SUN

Orion Henderson is the Director of Sustainability and Engineering, Campus & Community Planning, at The University of British Columbia. The CIRS building (pictured), does things like capture rainwater and treat it for drinking, and treating toilet and sink water for use in landscaping and flushing toilets.Jenelle Schneider
/ SUN

The CIRS building at UBC (pictured), does things like capture rainwater and treat it for drinking, and treating toilet and sink water for use in landscaping and flushing toilets.Jenelle Schneider
/ SUN

Orion Henderson is the Director of Sustainability and Engineering, Campus & Community Planning, at The University of British Columbia. The CIRS building (pictured), does things like capture rainwater and treat it for drinking, and treating toilet and sink water for use in landscaping and flushing toilets.Jenelle Schneider
/ SUN

The CIRS building at UBC (pictured), does things like capture rainwater and treat it for drinking, and treating toilet and sink water for use in landscaping and flushing toilets.Jenelle Schneider
/ SUN

Orion Henderson is the Director of Sustainability and Engineering, Campus & Community Planning, at The University of British Columbia. The CIRS building (pictured), does things like capture rainwater and treat it for drinking, and treating toilet and sink water for use in landscaping and flushing toilets.Jenelle Schneider
/ SUN

Related

When it comes to reducing its carbon footprint, the University of B.C. has set some pretty lofty goals, including eliminating greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.

If the university reaches its goals, the institution might be able to call itself the world’s greenest city.

“UBC is an example of what you can do with a city if you get things right,” James Tansey said.

Tansey is the CEO of Offsetters Climate Solutions, which provides carbon-management solutions to organizations, and an associate professor at the Sauder School of Business. He has been involved at the university in what he calls “the clean technology side and the wider sustainable policy side.”

“And there are some great examples here I think governments can replicate on a city level.”

With 60,000 inhabitants on a given day, the Vancouver campus already functions like a city, he notes. And the university’s leadership has committed to turning it into a living laboratory for clean technology innovation with targets of 33 per cent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2015 and 67 per cent by 2020.

The university’s Academic District Energy System is one example of an initiative to curb greenhouse gases. The system, which distributes thermal energy, is currently being converted from steam to more efficient hot water. By 2015, the $88m project will heat over 130 buildings. Estimates say this conversion will reduce UBC’s thermal energy use by 24 per cent and GHG emissions by over 22 per cent (the equivalent of taking 2,000 cars off the road).

Another GHG-reducing project is the Bioenergy Research and Development Facility. A $34m partnership between UBC, Nexterra and GE, the BRDF is North America’s first commercial demonstration of a system in which gasification and syngas conditioning technologies (from Nexterra) are used to turn locally sourced biomass (tree trimmings and wood chips from local landfills) into fuel to power a high-efficiency Jenbacher internal combustion engine (GE). The result is economic, community-scale heat and power, including 2 MW (megawatts) of clean, renewable electricity and 3 MW of thermal energy.

A third initiative is the Continuous Optimization Program. This program ensures the re-commissioning of all major academic buildings on campus.

“This project is known as building ‘tune-ups,’ as we are re-commissioning building automation systems in a similar way as you would send your car to the garage for a tune up,” said Orion Henderson. Henderson is the Director of Sustainability and Engineering for UBC Campus and Community Planning.

As a stand-alone, controlled system, UBC is the perfect petri dish for such projects.

“We can control all the utilities, we control our natural gas,” Tansey said. “We’ve got hands on most of the levers. In some ways we have more control. BC Hydro doesn’t service the facilities on the campus. We manage those ourselves, so we can make our own decisions about where to make investments and where to make improvements.”

Some of the improvements and innovations at UBC can apply outside the campus, as well.

“UBC wants to be more sustainable through smart business practices, because we believe that if we can show we can be more sustainable through smart business practices, that is something that is transferable,” Henderson said.

“Using the campus as a living laboratory for sustainability, to demonstrate in this urban setting, this small city, lessons that can be applied elsewhere, is an important part of what we’re doing. We want to play that role.”

Tansey says that one take-away model is using the savings from energy efficiency to fund projects.

“That creates an entrepreneurial mode that encourages staff to seek those kinds of reductions,” he said. “The more reductions they generate, the more budget they have the following year.”

UBC is also in a position to use major infrastructure upgrades as opportunities to test out new technologies.

“We looked at the way we spend money here, and we decided that very time we’re going to look at major infrastructure upgrade or a major energy system upgrade, we’re going to use that as an opportunity to run demonstration projects, and attract funding from the innovation agencies and then the federal and provincial governments,” Tansey said.

One of the keys to achieving the university’s goals is having everyone, from faculty to students, on board. Their demand for progress helps the sustainability movement compete for limited resources.

“If you’re investing in retrofitting a building to make it more energy efficient, in a way you’re competing for money which could be spent in a multitude of other ways,” Henderson said.

“Part of that justification for that funding is the fact that students and faculty want the university to exemplify those areas of sustainability.”

Some aspects of sustainability are hidden, he notes, such as many of the ways the university is achieving its GHG reduction targets.

“The majority of that is coming from changes to our infrastructure, which is something that most people don’t see.”

Then again, some innovations are quite visible.

Opened in 2011, the Centre for Interactive Research on Sustainability has been designed to reduce campus energy use, carbon emissions and potable water. Heat exchangers capture waste heat from a nearby building (the Earth and Ocean Sciences Building) and a geo-exchange system captures heat from the ground in the winter and rejects heat into the ground in the summer. Captured rainwater is stored in a tank and treated on-site. A bio-filtration system treats waste-water. Even the cafeteria is involved — it sells no bottled beverages and uses recyclable cutlery.

“If we’re going to achieve that 100 per cent target, then we need have this type of vision for our buildings, where we are using as little energy as possible and then hopefully being able to recover energy from the environment,” said Henderson.

The building itself is dedicated to the study of processes, strategies, policies and technologies for sustainability.

Visible or not, the university’s green innovations are making a difference.

“Our 2013 GHG inventory indicates that we have already achieved a 13.5 per cent reduction since 2007, despite an 11 per cent increase in floor space and 16 per cent increase in full-time student enrolment,” Henderson said. “It’s going to be tight and depends on projects finishing on schedule, but we believe we are still on track to hit the 33 per cent reduction target in 2015.”

Bioenergy Research and Develoment Facility

Nexterra, GE and UBC’s transformative bioenergy system:

— The Bioenergy Research and Develoment Facility houses an energy-from-renewable-waste combined heat and power (CHP) system.

— It is the first commercial demonstration in North America using Nexterra’s gasification and syngas conditioning technology.

— Using syngas as fuel, the GE Jenbacher gas engine can generate three megawatts of thermal energy, enough to displace 12 per cent of campus natural gas consumption. The engine can also produce two megawatts of clean, renewable electricity, enough to power 1,300 homes.

— The system can produce 7 MW of heat, replacing enough natural gas to reduce UBC’s greenhouse gas emissions by up to 5,000 tonnes a year.

— The facility is powered by two to three truckloads of locally sourced biomass delivered daily by Langley-based Cloverdale Fuels.

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